Luxus VS Reality

I've been a reality user for a few months now, and I LOVE the program. For the most part it works flawlessly, other times with certain textures it causes LuxRender to crash... Most notably with the additional downloads for the scoopback mini dress and some other things. Because of this I'm considering getting Luxus as well. I'd like to get some feedback on Luxus and those who use it. Does it have compatibility issues with certain textures and etc. that cause Lux to crash as well? Is it more compatible with the wealth of textures, shaders available here at daz?

I'd like a comparison list if anyone can think of some plus and minuses with both programs. Renders with both programs would be a big plus too!

Thanks!

Comments

Can you provide details on what is happening with Lux? What version you are using, what the error is, etc? Reality and Luxus both translate Studio to LuxRender scenes, and while there are some differences in how they do so, ultimately the Lux scene definition language is the same. So if a texture or mesh is causing LuxRender to crash, that's likely to happen regardless of which export tool is used.

I'm using 1.2 of lux atm, since I had some issues getting rc1 to work correctly with reality. As for the errors, I'm not sure where to find them after lux crashes and closes. So far I'm not too impressed with the Luxus renders I see here on daz, to me they look like normal ds renders. On that note though: I am seeing no static in any of the renders, whereas with Reality I see screenshots with a lot of noise in them. I'm not sure if it's just time-based (people's experience with Luxus, etc.). My other concerns are of course (and these are my biggest concerns) is how far out in the future luxus will be supported. DAZ has disappointed me a lot with their upgrades and prices. The owner of Reality is very responsive, friendly and personable. Yet: the luxus store page contains absolutely nothing about his name, contact information, official forums (NOT daz forums, I mean his personal forums), or twitter accounts. Etc.

I'd hate to have daz be my only contact option for luxus. in general I have not liked the responces I have gotten when contacting a company (mostly daz) about the inner workings of certain aspects of their products. paolo, on the other hand is very hands-on and has tutorials galore, not just forum posts, but an active Youtube account as well with detailed instructions, tutorials and walkthroughs.

So far my only search results on luxus have been the daz forums, I haven't yet come across any youtube page from the author, but I'm still hunting around. Unless Luxus is so simplified that it uses more of the language of the DS rendering and doesn't need the comprehensive adjustments of reality: Then that would be fine.

When it comes down to basics, Luxus is a far more hands-on converter than Reality. While in Reality 2.5 you have access to basic material settings, in Luxus you can control literally everything and have access to every material Lux does. The upside to this is that you can render very complex scenes using Luxus without ever needing to manually edit the Luxus files directly, the downside to this is it does require an understanding of how Lux materials work. By contrast, Reality 2.5 makes it far easier to convert materials, but does so at an upper level and by doing so it denies you access to the underlying mechanics and fine tuning.

Luxus, like Reality, will automatically convert materials based on certain criteria if they haven't been given specific Luxrender materials. This usually results in a glossy material, much like Reality 2.5 does for materials. I've found Luxus' material conversions very similar to Reality, but Reality does have an advantage when it comes to camera options and IBLs so that things like Depth of Field are easier to execute.

As to the source of your crashes, GPU acceleration is the most likely cause. Luxrender still has significant issues when trying to use hybrid rendering and even the 1.3 dev release hasn't fixed this problem. I have an OpenCL compatible graphics card (I can render just fine in SmallLuxGPU [SLG]) but it refuses to render in hybrid mode due to a bug which hasn't been fixed. For some scenes however, there is a fix. Enter the following line into the render settings of your LXS file exported by Reality 2.5.

"integer opencl.gpu.workgroup.size" [64]

That may enable you to render using Hybrid rendering, but it's not a guarantee.

... The upside to this is that you can render very complex scenes using Luxus without ever needing to manually edit the Luxus files directly...

So you can't render complex scenes in Reality without having to edit the Realty file directly?
Perhaps I should have rephrased that to 'none that require complex materials'. Reality has no support for mix, cloth and car paint materials nor volumes beyond simple fog and glass. Reality 3 recently launched for Poser which addresses many of these issues, but it is not yet available for Daz Studio.

Mix materials especially can be extremely useful. For example you could combine metal and cloth materials so that you can map shine onto textured buttons or zippers on an outfit,. You could also combine glossy and mirror materials to create a more reflective surface like ceramic tiles.

Reality also has fairly basic support for glossy translucent materials and neglects a few useful parameters such as absorption depth. To achieve a glossy translucent material in Reality you need to set the translucency flag on and the mix to 0%. Beyond that you get none of the specific parameters for glossy translucent materials, just the ones shared by regular glossy materials. You also get no option to use textures for transmission colour like you do with Luxus.

By no means should Reality be discounted though. It's an extremely powerful tool and is great for beginners who may benefit from the way Reality handles shader conversions. However, for the power user, Luxus just puts more tools at your disposal and gives you the ability to tweak everything from the ground up. Though, it's naturally a lot harder to master as a result.

I've gotten luxrender to crash because of complex geometries or bad ones. its possible your geometries are not translating to a recognizable form that luxrender can use. Have you tried loading the possible cause item into a new scene and rendering it self by itself, if that works you can take the offending scene and see if the possible cause item and deleting everything in the scene but that and see if it works, and if it does there may be something entirely different.

It has been several months now. I bought Reality the first minutes it was available all that time ago. I wasn't actively around when it all hit the fan and Paolo went elsewhere. I've been wondering about Luxus for quite some time now. Is it a turn for the better when using LuxRender?

It has been several months now. I bought Reality the first minutes it was available all that time ago. I wasn't actively around when it all hit the fan and Paolo went elsewhere. I've been wondering about Luxus for quite some time now. Is it a turn for the better when using LuxRender?

In short, Reality is easier to use while Luxus is far more robust.

Reality currently floats above the DS UI as a seperate window while Luxus is fully integrated into the DS UI. As a result, some features in Luxus may not be very obvious as they are right under your nose.

Reality auto converts ALL surfaces to Lux Render materials. Luxus will auto convert but I dont know if its an actual Lux material or not. As a result, going from Reality to Lux, things are very bright and shiny by default. Going from Luxus to Lux, surfaces are not shiny at all and are a tad dull. Converting to Lux materials is till best. The up side of Luxus not converting everything to a shiny surface like Reality is that its personally easier to just do a few surfaces at a time with out being distracted by the brightness of all the other surfaces.